The Honeymoon Wasn’t Cancelled

A Steamy FFM Polyamorous Vacation Romance
by Isla Wilde

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FFM (Why Choose Triad)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Why Choose, Bisexual Awakening, Best Friends to Lovers, Brother’s Best Friend, Jilted Bride, One Bed, Forced Proximity, Vacation Romance, Praise Kink, Closed Triad

Her fiancé cancelled the wedding. The honeymoon was nonrefundable.

Daphne Prescott plans perfect weddings for a living. Ten days before her own, the groom backed out, and all she has left is a laminated itinerary and fourteen prepaid nights in an overwater villa in Curaçao.

So she takes her best friend. Ramona is loud, tattooed, impossible to be sad around, and has been keeping two secrets: she has been in love with Daphne since college, and she has been sleeping with Daphne’s brother’s best friend since April.

Gideon designed the villa. He is already on the island. He is quiet, steady, and very good with his hands, and after a storm floods his room he is also standing in the doorway of a honeymoon suite with exactly one bed.

Couples massage. Sunset sail. Private dinner for two. Daphne paid for every romantic minute of this trip, and she intends to use them.

She just never planned on needing a third chair.

The Honeymoon Wasn’t Cancelled is a high-heat FFM why choose romance with a bi-awakening heroine, best friends to lovers, brother’s best friend, one bed, three points of view, and a closed-triad HEA. No cheating. No choosing.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A jilted bride who takes the honeymoon anyway, laminated binder and all
✅ Best friends to lovers, after fourteen years of one of them pining
✅ Her brother’s best friend: quiet, careful, and done being careful
✅ One overwater villa, one enormous bed, one storm
✅ Every booked-for-two activity done as three
✅ Explicit FF, MF and FFM scenes where everyone says what they want out loud
✅ A resort staff that keeps bringing a third chair without blinking
✅ Why choose with no choosing: closed triad, no cheating, no third-act breakup, HEA
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat that starts in Chapter Two

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains extremely explicit sexual content (graphic FF, MF and FFM scenes throughout, including a strap-on) and strong language. It also contains one early scene of secret voyeurism: the heroine watches the other two leads have sex before either of them knows she is there. She tells them, the book treats it as a line crossed, and everything after that is openly negotiated and enthusiastically consensual. Also includes light consensual restraint and power play, on-page tattooing, and a called-off wedding. No cheating. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read all of Chapter One right here.

Chapter One: Daphne

Yesterday I was supposed to get married.

Today a young man in a linen shirt slid a key card across a slab of polished driftwood, smiled like he’d been waiting all week to say it, and said, “Welcome to Kas Laman, Mrs. Tolliver.”

I had prepared for a lot. I’d prepared for the airport, where the gate agent asked if my travel companion would be boarding, and I got to say no and watch her delete a man with one keystroke. I’d prepared for seat 14B, which stayed empty the whole flight down with Warren’s pre-ordered low-sodium meal sweating on its tray, until Ramona leaned over from 14C and ate it out of spite. I had a checklist. I’m a wedding planner. I have a checklist for when the florist’s van catches fire.

There was no line item for Mrs. Tolliver.

My mouth opened. Nothing came out of it. Somewhere behind my sternum, a very small and very organized woman started pulling fire alarms.

“She couldn’t make it,” Ramona said.

She dropped an elbow on the desk beside mine, all five foot nine of her, sunglasses shoved up into her curls, ink running from both wrists into the sleeves of a T-shirt that said SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL COVEN. “Mrs. Tolliver. Tragic, really. Never existed. What you’ve got instead is Ms. Daphne Prescott, who is a goddamn delight, and her plus-one, who is me. Castillo, two L’s. I’d like whatever that blue drink is, and I’d like it to keep happening.”

The young man looked at his screen. He looked at me. He looked at Ramona. I braced for the face, the soft, sorry one I’d been getting for ten days from caterers and cousins and the woman who does my eyebrows.

It didn’t come. He tapped four keys.

“Ms. Prescott,” he said, exactly as warmly as before. “Ms. Castillo. Bon bini. It means welcome. I have corrected the name on the villa, the spa, the restaurant, and the boat. Will Mr. Tolliver be joining you later in the stay?”

“No.” It was the first word I’d managed, and it came out steadier than I felt. “He won’t. It’s just the two of us.”

“Then I will need to make one more key.”

He did. That was the whole transaction. Seven years with a man, wiped from the hospitality system of a luxury resort in under eleven seconds and replaced by a woman who was currently testing whether she could reach the garnish tray from the guest side of the desk.

Here’s the short version, because it doesn’t deserve a long one.

Ten days before the wedding, Warren called me from his car. He said, “I can’t do it, Daph. I love you, and I can’t do it, and I don’t think you really want to either.” He wasn’t cruel. He cried. I didn’t. I said okay, and then, God help me, I asked if he wanted me to handle the caterer. I un-planned a hundred and forty guests in six days. The ceremony I cancelled without a pang. It was the dinner that got me, a little. I’d had that seating chart perfect since Labor Day. The only thing I couldn’t cancel was this: fourteen nights at a resort that wasn’t technically open yet, prepaid, nonrefundable, booked in March under the name I was going to have.

That’s the kind of thing I thought was romantic in March.

“Your villa is number nine,” the young man said. “Over the water, at the end of the west boardwalk. It is our best. The architect is still on the property finishing some small things, so if you see a very tall man frowning at a hinge, please do not be alarmed.”

Ramona’s hand, halfway to a maraschino cherry, stopped.

It was a tiny thing. I caught it the way I catch a centerpiece sitting half an inch off its mark. Then two blue drinks arrived on a tray and I lost the thought.

“Gideon,” I said. “Gideon Laurent. He’s a family friend. He’s the reason we got the rate.”

“Then he is the reason you cannot get it back.” The young man looked honestly sorry about that. “But you will not want to. Two weeks of sun. This time of year the guests always ask me about hurricanes, and I tell them we are below the belt. It never storms here.”

“Below the belt,” Ramona said around her straw. “Daph. He said it, not me.”

I laughed.

It startled me. It was the first one in ten days I hadn’t had to assemble by hand.

“There she is,” Ramona said, low, just for me. She bumped my shoulder with hers and pressed the key card into my palm.

Villa 9 had been designed by someone who wanted me to have sex.

I say that as a professional. I’ve walked a couple hundred bridal suites, and I know the difference between a room that is merely nice and a room with an agenda. This one stood on its own legs at the far end of the boardwalk, over water so clear and so blue it looked retouched. Thatched roof. A whole wall of teak shutters folded back so the bedroom simply became the deck, and the deck became the sea. A plunge pool about the size of a generous bathtub. A ladder straight down into the lagoon. A shower outdoors, behind a screen of slatted wood that screened nothing. A daybed under its own little canopy, wide and white.

And the bed.

One. King wasn’t the word. You could have landed a small aircraft on it. It faced the open water, it was hung with gauze, and in the middle of the white duvet somebody on staff had built a heart out of red rose petals roughly the diameter of a manhole cover. Two towels folded into swans sat inside it, beak to beak, kissing. Between them, a card.

Congratulations, Mr. & Mrs. Tolliver. May tonight be the first of forever.

“Oh, fuck off,” Ramona told the swans.

I didn’t say anything. I was fine. I’d been fine at the front desk and fine on the plane, and fine yesterday at four o’clock, when I should have been walking down an aisle and was instead on my couch alphabetizing vendor refunds. I’d been fine for so long that it took me a second to understand why the petals had gone blurry.

It was the swans. It’s always something stupid. I have folded that swan. I teach hotel staff to fold that swan. It takes two bath towels and about ninety seconds, and somebody did it this morning for a woman they thought was happy.

“Hey.”

Ramona was in front of me. She took my face in both hands, thumbs under my eyes, palms warm and a little rough the way they’ve been ever since she started tattooing. She smelled like airplane and coconut sunscreen and the clove gum she chews when she’s quitting something.

“Look at me. Not the birds. Me.”

I looked. Brown eyes, nose stud, the freckle at the corner of her mouth that I’ve known for fifteen years.

“You get to hate this,” she said. “You don’t have to make it nice. Nobody in this room needs you to make it nice.”

“I’m not crying about Warren.”

“I know.”

“I’m crying about towel origami.”

“I know, baby. It’s very moving.” She kissed my forehead, hard, like stamping a passport, and let me go. Then she picked up the left-hand swan by its neck, snapped it out into a perfectly ordinary bath towel, and slung it over her shoulder. “There. She’s divorced. She’s thriving. She kept the house.”

The noise I made was half sob, half laugh, and not dignified in any part.

“The other one can stay,” Ramona decided. “He can sit there and think.”

After that she went through the villa like weather. The card went in the trash. The champagne came out of its bucket, and she had the cork out before I could suggest saving it, drinking from the neck and passing it over like we were twenty and sitting on a fire escape. She found the glass panel set into the floor at the foot of the bed, a window straight down into lit turquoise water where a parrotfish was going about its evening, and she stood on it barefoot and said, “Daphne. There’s a hole in the floor so the fish can watch.”

“It’s so you can watch the fish.”

“From the bed? Naked? At night? That is not who’s watching who.” She crouched and rapped a knuckle on the glass. “Hi, pervert.”

Then she found the robes.

They hung side by side on teak pegs, heavy white waffle cotton, embroidered over the heart in navy thread. HERS. HIS.

Ramona looked at them. She looked at me. A slow, terrible smile spread across her face.

“Don’t,” I said.

She pulled the coven shirt off over her head.

I have seen Ramona undress more times than I could count. Dorm rooms, fitting rooms, the back of her shop when she’s swapping out a shirt with ink on it. It has never once been a thing. I have a policy about it not being a thing, a policy as old and as carefully maintained as my policy about a certain New Year’s Eve when we were twenty-one, and both have held up beautifully for more than a decade.

So I did not notice the black bra, which was less a garment than a rumor. I did not notice that the vines on her arms kept going, up over her shoulders and down along her collarbones, or that there was a peony on her hip I’d never seen before, its lowest petals sliding under the waistband of her underwear as she kicked her jeans across the floor. I did not notice that she was long and lean and brown and completely at ease, standing in a bar of Caribbean light in a room built for exactly one activity.

I looked at the fish. The fish and I understood each other.

“Ta-da,” Ramona said.

HIS hit her at mid-thigh. She hadn’t bothered to tie it. She put one hand on her hip and the other on the bedpost and gave me a look of deep husbandly satisfaction.

“Well, Mrs. Me. What’s on the agenda?”

That, at least, I could answer. I got the binder out of my carry-on.

It’s a good binder. Inch-and-a-half spine, D-ring, fourteen color-coded tabs, every page laminated, confirmation numbers in the footers and a zip pocket in the back for receipts. On the cover, in the typeface I use for clients who ask for “timeless,” it said THE TOLLIVER HONEYMOON. Under that: Mr. & Mrs. Warren Tolliver. Kas Laman, Curaçao.

Ramona stared at it for a long moment.

“You laminated your honeymoon.”

“Sunscreen gets on things.”

“Daph.”

“It’s a wet environment.”

She took it out of my hands, sat down cross-legged in the dead center of the rose-petal heart with the robe falling open, and started turning pages. I watched her read my handwriting. It’s a strange thing, watching someone go through your plan for the happiest two weeks of your life, in order, with tabs.

“Day two. House reef snorkel, private guide, for two. Day three, couples massage and…” She squinted. “What the hell is a flower bath?”

“A bath. With flowers in it.”

“For two.”

“Everything’s for two, Mona. It’s a honeymoon.”

“Day five, sunset sail. Day seven, dinner on the pier. ‘Table for two, request the far end, confirm no other bookings.’ Day twelve…” Her eyebrows climbed. “‘Plunge pool, champagne, do not disturb.’ That’s it? That’s the entire entry?”

“It was self-explanatory.”

“Daphne Prescott. You scheduled the sex.”

“I blocked time.” My face had gone hot. “People don’t block time, and then they fly home and realize they spent their whole honeymoon at a buffet.”

She laughed, the big one, the one that makes strangers in restaurants turn around smiling. When it faded she shut the binder on one finger to hold her place and tilted her head at me.

“We don’t have to do any of this. You know that, right? We can lie on a beach for two weeks and drink things with fruit in them, and you can not be in charge of one single goddamn minute.”

“It’s paid for.”

“So?”

“So all of it is paid for. Every item. I can’t get a dollar of it back.” I could hear my voice going thin and tight and couldn’t loosen it. “I spent a year on this. I’m good at this. It’s a really, really good honeymoon, and I’m not letting it rot because the groom dropped out. We’re doing the binder. Every page.”

She studied me a second longer. I knew that look. It’s the one she gives a nervous first-timer in her chair, when she’s deciding whether they need to be talked out of it or just need her to pick up the machine.

“Okay,” she said. “Every page.”

“You don’t have to…”

“Every page. I’ll snorkel. I’ll get rubbed. I’ll sit in your flower soup.” She flipped back to the first tab and ran a fingertip down it. “‘Six p.m. Welcome toast, main dock, sunset. Table for two.’ That’s in forty minutes. Go wash your face, wife. I’m taking you out for drinks.”

She rolled off the bed. Rose petals stuck to the backs of her thighs.

I didn’t notice that, either.

“I’ll take the daybed tonight,” I said to her back.

“You’ll take the left side, like you have since sophomore year, and you’ll keep your freezing feet to yourself.” She didn’t turn around. “It’s one bed. We’ve survived worse.”

We had. That wasn’t the part worrying me.

The main dock ran a hundred feet out from the beach bar and ended in a square platform with a single table on it. White cloth, two chairs, a hurricane lamp, a silver bucket. Beyond it the sun was going down into all that water like it had been booked for the occasion.

I checked it against the page. Table, yes. End of the dock, yes. Two flutes, yes. Months ago I’d left myself a note in the margin: W. hates being photographed, don’t ask staff. I put my thumb over it.

“To the binder,” Ramona said, and clinked her glass against mine.

She’d changed into a black slip dress and, as far as I could tell, nothing else, and the low light was doing unreasonable things to her shoulders. I had on a sundress, my hair back up in its clip, and most of a flute of champagne on top of half the bottle from the villa. For the first time in ten days there was a little room in my chest.

That was when I heard boots on the dock.

Nobody wears boots at a place like this. I turned around, and there was Gideon Laurent, walking out of the sunset with a tape measure on his belt.

I’ve known Gideon since I was nineteen and he was the enormous, quiet senior who rowed in my brother’s boat and turned up at our mother’s table every Thanksgiving. For fifteen years he has lived in my head in a box marked Des’s friend, and I’ve never had a reason to open it.

He was in canvas work pants and a grey T-shirt gone dark down the spine with sweat. Sawdust on his forearms. A flat carpenter’s pencil behind one ear, reading glasses hooked in his collar, a roll of drawings under his arm. Six foot three, sun-browned, with more silver at his temples than he’d had at Easter. It took me a second to work out why he looked so different.

At home, Gideon always stood in a room like he was checking it for exits. Here he looked like he’d built the place. Which, I remembered, he had.

“Daphne,” he said.

He’s the only person I know who uses all of it, every single time. Two syllables, no hurry.

“Gideon. Hi.” I stood up, and he hugged me, one arm, brief, careful of the sawdust. He smelled like cedar and salt and a full day of work. I filed that under dehydration.

“I’m not going to ask how you are,” he said.

Something in my throat let go a little. “Thank you.”

“I’ll ask what you need.”

“I need the next fourteen days to go exactly according to this.” I tapped the binder.

He looked at it for a long moment. Grey eyes. One corner of his mouth moved.

“You laminated it.”

That made twice in two hours. I turned to Ramona and waited for it. That’s what I said. Tell her it’s deranged, Laurent. Ask her about day twelve. She has called him by his last name since the night they met, at my twenty-fifth birthday, when she spent an hour trying to make him laugh and took it as a personal victory when he finally did. Ramona has never met a quiet man she didn’t consider a dare.

Ramona was looking at the water.

“Ramona,” Gideon said.

“Gideon.” She smiled at him. It was a perfectly nice smile. “Good to see you.”

“You too. Good flight?”

“It was fine, thank you.”

Fine, thank you. In fifteen years I had never heard those words leave that woman’s mouth in that order.

A server arrived at my elbow before I could chase the thought. He had a third chair in one hand and a third flute in the other. He set them down without a word or a glance, as though tables for two sprouted extra places here all the time, poured, and left.

Gideon didn’t sit. He rested one hand on the chair back. There were about three feet of dock between him and Ramona, and I only noticed because neither of them drifted. People drift. Stand any two humans at a cocktail table and they sway toward each other and away again, shift their weight, lean. These two stood like the gap had been measured and marked.

“Des called me,” Gideon said.

“Of course he did.”

“He asked me to keep an eye on you.”

“And what did you tell my brother?”

“That you didn’t need one.” He picked up the flute, considered it like it might be load-bearing, and put it down untouched. “I’m going to anyway.”

Heat climbed the back of my neck for no reason I could name. I blamed the champagne.

“I owe you an apology,” he said. “For the rate. If I’d put you on the standard booking you’d have your money back.”

“You’d have had to know before Warren did. I didn’t even manage that.”

It came out drier than I’d intended. Ramona snorted into her glass, a real one. For half a second Gideon’s eyes cut to her, and something was in them, quick and warm and then gone, like a door opening on a lit room and closing again.

Then he was studying the horizon, and she was studying her drink.

“I’m on site two more weeks,” he told me. “Punch list. Forty-one items. Your outdoor shower was number twelve. Somebody put the valve in backward. It’s fixed.” A pause. “You’re welcome.”

“What was it doing?”

“Running cold. Only cold.”

“In the honeymoon villa,” Ramona said, and I thought, there she is, here it comes.

She stopped. She actually stopped, with the joke sitting right there, and took a sip instead.

“I’m in the consultant bungalow,” Gideon went on. “End of the east boardwalk, green shutters. If anything in that villa sticks, leaks, or squeaks, come and find me. Any hour.”

He said it to me. He made a real point of saying it to me.

Ramona finished her champagne in one swallow.

“Enjoy the sunset, Daphne.” He nodded across the table. “Ramona.”

“Night, Gideon.”

His boots went back up the dock, unhurried. I watched him go for longer than was strictly necessary. The damp shirt. The shoulders. The pencil he’d forgotten was behind his ear. When I turned back, Ramona had been watching too, and she looked away so fast she nearly put her elbow in the lamp.

“He got hot,” I said, testing.

“Did he?” said my best friend, who once ranked every groomsman at my cousin’s wedding out loud, during the vows. “I hadn’t noticed.”

At one in the morning I was still awake.

The shutters were open and the gauze breathed in and out. Water slapped the pilings under the floor. The lit panel at the foot of the bed threw slow blue nets across the ceiling, and on the dresser the surviving swan sat alone and thought about things.

Ramona slept the way she does everything, all at once and taking up room. She’d started the night on her own side of a mattress built for a volleyball team. Somewhere around midnight she’d migrated, flat on her stomach in a tank top and underwear, face mashed into the pillow, one arm flung up over her head. One long leg had come out from under the sheet and crossed the middle of the bed, and her bare shin was lying warm against my calf.

I should have moved. I wasn’t moving.

Every inch of skin where we touched had its own pulse. She sighed in her sleep and her knee slid an inch higher, and I lay there staring at the ceiling with my heart going like I’d taken the stairs. I did what I always do when I can’t sleep.

I thought about seating charts.

Nine years of round tables of ten have taught me exactly one thing I have never gotten wrong. People who’ve never thought about touching each other don’t keep track of the space between them. They drift. They bump elbows and don’t register it. There’s only one kind of pair that holds three feet and never wavers, and I seat them on opposite sides of the room.

Ramona and Gideon had stood precisely that far apart for the length of a sunset.

Nobody is that careful around a body they haven’t already had their hands on.

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The Other Side of the Shutters — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

Night two, from Ramona’s side of the green shutters: what happened before Daphne got there, what Ramona saw between the slats, and what she asked Gideon for in the shower afterward. Then, one year later, Daphne puts it on the schedule and Ramona finally gets the window.

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